Yes. How do you see that against the background of the essay presented by DF Polis?

Doesn't this imply that matter is capable of intentional action? — Wayfarer

At a sufficient level of organization, yes.

Yes. How do you see that against the background of the essay presented by DF Polis? — Paine

His article argues that functionality can't be explained by examining the physiology of the CNS. Whether or not this is true has no bearing in whether a theory of consciousness is possible.

But the term 'theory' is commonly used in such discussions in a looser sense. See for example Theories of Consciousness in Nature.com

Doesn't this imply that matter is capable of intentional action?
— Wayfarer

At a sufficient level of organization, yes. — Fooloso4

But there must be some level of intention to reach a sufficient level of organisation in the first place. (I'll leave it there until I finish the article.)

That article is behind a paywall. One of the theories mentioned in the abstract is IIT. Chalmers has offered his thoughts about the pros and cons of that approach, specifically what he thinks it would need to accomplish it's goal. At present, it's only a broad outline. I'm failing to see what point you're trying to make.

Why does it have no bearing when the question of what can be reduced to a function is the center of both enquiries?

So you want to say something like that the source of the concept "the rock is hard" is not a predication but an identity? — Banno

I said what I wanted to say in my article: One and the same reality must be the source of both the subject and predicate concepts for the judgement to be true. If one reality elicits <This rock> and a different reality elicits <hard>, the judgement (not concept) <This rock is hard> is unjustified.

You keep saying, despite the text of my article, that I am claiming the subject and predicate are identical. They are not. Perhaps you believe that concepts can only be different if the object eliciting them is different. That is a misconception. One and the same object can elicit many concepts: e.g. <spherical>, <red>, <rubber>, <soft>, <elastic>, etc., etc.

Nor is it at all clear what the source of a concept might be. — Banno

Again, reading my article resolves this: "If we are aware of feeling a stone, we can abstract the concept <hard>. Then, being aware that the identical object elicits both <the stone> and <hard>, we link these concepts to judge <the stone is hard>, giving propositional knowledge." (p. 110) Clearly, the stone we are feeling is the source of the relevant concepts.

Concepts are sometimes erroneously conceived of as mental furniture, as things inside the mind to be pushed around, repositioned in different arrangements. Concepts are sometimes better understood as abilities than as abstract objects. There then need be no discreet concept of "hard" situated somewhere in the mind, or in the brain, but instead a propensity to certain outputs from a neural net, which includes the construction of certain sentences such as "this rock is hard" - along connectionist lines. — Banno

I have taken none of these positions. I said, "the concept <apple> is not a thing, but an activity, viz. the actualization of an apple representation’s intelligibility." (p. 109). Surely, you will agree that we have neural representations and are aware of some of their contents.

Indeed, I'll offer connectionist models of representation as far superior to a regression to Aristotelian models. — Banno

You seem to think that connectionism is an alternative to my analysis. It is not. I have no fundamental problem with connectionism. In fact, I invoked it to make one of my points (p. 99). What connectionism tells us, if true, is how representations are generated, instantiated and activated. It does not even attempt to explain how we become aware of the contents they encode -- how their intelligibility becomes actually known.

Why does it have no bearing when the question of what can be reduced to a function is the center of both enquiries? — Paine

Function can be reduced (explained) by neuroscience. This is Chalmers' "easy problem."

Neuroscience has been pretty successful here.

You are dodging the challenge to your challenge in relation to reduction in regard to you saying, "whether a theory of consciousness is possible."

↪frank
You are dodging the challenge to your challenge in relation to reduction in regard to you saying, "whether a theory of consciousness is possible." — Paine

Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about.

You said:

His article argues that functionality can't be explained by examining the physiology of the CNS. Whether or not this is true has no bearing in whether a theory of consciousness is possible. — frank

You assert this as a self evident fact. It is not self evident to me. Chalmers went to some effort to argue otherwise. Thus my quote from his initial essay.

I was talking about the OP's article.

Me too.

I was responding to your summary of the article.

Surely you know that some physicists hold that the laws are the descriptions of the behavior of matter. — Fooloso4

The laws of physics are such descriptions. Still, if there were not some reality (the laws of nature) making matter behave that way, the descriptions would have no predictive value. Suppose I accurately described your behavior on a particular day. I could only use it to predict your future behavior if the description revealed some consistent dynamic -- perhaps a habit. So my ability to predict would not be based on having a description per se, (for most of it would not be repeated), but on the dynamic the description revealed. In the same way, without the assumption of universal laws of nature guiding the behavior of matter, theoretical physics would be inapplicable to new cases.

When I say physical I mean that consciousness is not given to or added on to beings that are conscious. They are physical beings that have developed the capacities of knowing, willing, hoping, etc. — Fooloso4

Yes. Yet, that is saying what is, not why it is. The idea of reductionism, which I am opposing, is that we can deduce consciousness by applying the laws of physics to the physical structure of human beings. I am saying that we could only do so if physics predicted intentional effects, and it does not.

I have but you rejected it. The theory is that matter is self-organizing. At higher levels of organization capacities that were not present at lower levels emerge. — Fooloso4

Let's put aside how matter comes to be organized (whether by itself, or by the laws of nature). We can agree that over time, more complex structures have evolved. Most people (including me) would agree that evolution is fully consistent with physics. I agree also that new capacities, such as nutrition, growth and reproduction, have resulted.

These are physical, not intentional, capacities. So, there is no reason to think that they transcend the bounds of physics. Consciousness is not physical, but intentional, and so it is beyond the capacity of physics to explain. This does not tell us how consciousness comes to be. It only tells us that however it comes to be, physics is inadequate to explain it. Consciousness is correlated with a high level of physical organization, but correlation is not causation. So, complex organization is not an explanation either.

I'm failing to see what point you're trying to make. — frank

The point is

the term 'theory' is commonly used in such discussions in a looser sense. — Fooloso4

From the abstract:

Recent years have seen a blossoming of theories about the biological and physical basis of consciousness. Good theories guide empirical research, allowing us to interpret data, develop new experimental techniques and expand our capacity to manipulate the phenomenon of interest. Indeed, it is only when couched in terms of a theory that empirical discoveries can ultimately deliver a satisfying understanding of a phenomenon. However, in the case of consciousness, it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished. To clarify this complicated landscape, we review four prominent theoretical approaches to consciousness: higher-order theories, global workspace theories, re-entry and predictive processing theories and integrated information theory.

This use of theory does not conform to the restrictive sense you want to reserve it for. Unless you clarify what sense of 'theory' you mean your denial is misleading.

Sure. Look to context to understand usage.

Still, if there were not some reality (the laws of nature) making matter behave that way — Dfpolis

Well, that is one opinion. Law of nature are not some outside force that acts on nature. Surely you are aware that not all physicists hold to your concept of laws. It is because things behave in an orderly way that formulating laws is possible.

Yet, that is saying what is, not why it is. — Dfpolis

Why do you think it is?

So, there is no reason to think that they transcend the bounds of physics. — Dfpolis

Perhaps consciousness does not transcend the bounds of physics either, only our current understanding of physics.

I started reading this carefully with some quotes and counters, then got to about section 4 and started skimming.

First, this paper needs more focus. About half way through I forgot what you were even trying to show. You jump from this idea, to that idea from this philosopher, to over here, and I don't see a lot of commonality between them. You could probably cut your paper by quite a bit and still get to the point that you want.

Second, maybe you do understand what the hard problem is, but I had a hard problem in seeing that.

"I shall argue that it is logically impossible to reduce consciousness, and the intentional realities
flowing out of it, to a physical basis."

First, are you a neuroscientist? This is an incredibly bold claim. A neuroscientist will tell you, "We don't yet understand everything about the brain yet." Second, what about the easy problem of consciousness? We know if we give you some drugs, we can alter your conscious state. A man caught a disease and can no no longer see in color due to physical brain damage.

There is more than enough evidence that consciousness results from a physical basis. The hard problem really boils down to "What is it like to be another conscious being?" We can look at a brain, but we can't experience the brain from the brain's point of view. Does that mean that we don't need physical medium for consciousness to exist? No, we do. We can see the physical combination of factors that consistently result in certain conscious experiences for individuals. This is how brain surgery works. What a brain surgeon cannot do is BE you. No one can as of yet do some alteration of the mind and suddenly experience what it is like to experience exactly what you do.

"Does the Hard Problem reflect a failure of the reductive paradigm?"

No, not at all. The hard problem reflects the failure in our ability to experience what it is like to be another conscious being. We can reduce plenty of conscious experiences to brain states. But we can't be that brain state. We can reduce that brain state to its physical components, but its subjective experience is outside of our ability to understand. Reductionism does not fail in what it does. Reductionism does not attempt to claim what a subjective experience is like. Reductionism is a ruler that measures a mile, but it cannot tell you, nor try to tell you, what it is like to be that mile having the experience of being measured.

"I define ‘emergence’ as a logical property, viz. the impossibility of deducing a phenomenon from
fundamental principles, especially those of physics. Emergence can be physical, epistemological,
or ontological."

This is not what emergence means. "Emergent properties are the characteristics gained when an entity at any level, from molecular to global, plays a role in an organized system."
https://study.com/academy/lesson/emergent-properties-definition-examples.html

"However, absent a solution to the Hard Problem, believing consciousness to be
purely neural requires an act of faith."

I can give you one better example. Plants do not have neurons. And yet we find plants react to the world in a way that we consider to be conscious. A wiki article for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_(physiology)#:~:text=Plants%20do%20not%20have%20brains,computation%20and%20basic%20problem%20solving.

It has long been concluded that neurons are not needed for consciousness. Almost certainly AI will inevitably, if not somewhere already, be labeled as conscious. We'll be able to look at the program of an AI and go, "That right there is needed for the AI to be conscious." Will we know what its like to feel like a conscious AI? No. That is the hard problem, not that its consciousness can't be reduced to the physical processes it runs.

If the point was to show that we should describe consciousness through potency and act, I confess not understanding how you got there. You kept referencing so many different philosophers and their viewpoints that I was unable to really glean your own. So many of the references just don't seem needed, and got in the way of the overall point I feel you were trying to make. I can tell you're well learned, and I know a lot of hard work went into that though. I just don't feel its very clear in making its point, seems to have some questionable assumptions and definitions, and ultimately feels like it loses its focus with a poor finish.

:up:

:fire: :100:

I invite comments pro and con. — Dfpolis

Before I start, I want to be clear. I have only an engineer's interested, amateur understanding of cognitive science or philosophy of mind. I also admit to just scanning the linked article. I am not well-read enough to make a line-by-line response to your detailed and careful argument.

To start, it's very well written. Clear and thorough. I don't think I've read a better one here on the forum. But then, I find it flawed and unconvincing. The article states:

I see two sources of difficulty: the post-Cartesian conceptual space, and the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science. — Dfpolis

This indicates the problems with the scientific study of consciousness are philosophical, logical, not scientific. That shows my primary problem with your argument - you have shuffled the decks of philosophy and science together to provide a muddled, makeshift argument. When you deal out a science card you often make blanket pronouncements without support. You make a quick arm-wave to current cognitive scientific study of consciousness without showing you have given them a fair hearing. You talk about a Standard Model of neurophysiology which, as far as I can tell, is a concept you came up with yourself. I can't find any reference to it with a quick web search.

I share your skepticism about a reductionist scientific understanding of consciousness. This is from a paper on Merleau-Ponty's theory of form which I think is relevant. Streetlight provided a link to the paper in a discussion about five years ago.

Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot understand how knowledge arises within nature unless we abandon the Cartesian view of nature as a machine composed of mutually external and indifferent parts.

If nature is a mechanism then it has no intrinsic meaning or unity. Thus nature could only be meaningful for a constituting consciousness that imposes a meaning on it by synthesizing its disconnected parts into an ideal whole. However, this amounts to denying that we can know nature at all. First, it means that nature can only be known from the outside, from a God’s-eye-view that could comprehend it as an object. But this is not our situation; we find ourselves born into a nature that is older than thought, and indeed gives rise to it—a nature that we can never encompass or transcend. “Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not entirely an object; it does not exactly stand before us. It is our soil, not that which faces us, but that which carries us.” It is precisely for this reason that we wish to naturalize epistemology—to understand how knowledge arises within nature. Second, if the only meaning we can find in nature is one that we ourselves put into it, then nature ceases to be an object of knowledge that transcends consciousness and becomes instead an idea within consciousness—a representation or mental construct. — Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking

There's a lot more going on in the paper, some of which I admit to not understanding, but the author does not conclude that the study of mind is not accessible to scientific study.

:up:

However,

The hard problem really boils down to "What is it like to be another conscious being?" — Philosophim

this doesn't seem quite correct. One could argue that someone with MPD experiences just that. But, you might say, they shift from one to the other, so being in one state at a time. I would even question that assertion. I have actually had a meditative experience in which I was able to be myself and another simultaneously for a few brief moments. No, I'm not crazy. As a matter of fact whenever we talk to ourselves we indulge very slightly in this experience. But I'm setting up a strawman here, so I'll leave it.

The hard problem really boils down to "What is it like to be another conscious being?"
— Philosophim

this doesn't seem quite correct. — jgill

+1. That is indeed not the point of the argument. The point of the argument about 'what it is like to be...' is to convey the fact of being a subject of experience. 'Being a subject of experience' is not something that can be captured in any objective description. So depicting it in terms of 'what it is like to be someone else' plainly misses the point of the argument.

@Dfpolis - I've read most of the article. As I too am generally critical of physicalism and reductionism, then I'm onside with your general approach ('the enemy of the enemy is my friend ;-) ) - although there are a few specific points with which I will take issue, when I've spent a bit more time digesting it.

You put yourself at the center of your considerations and start with the thinking. This is arbitrary and only works with logic. Why not start with things and follow along. When you do that, you see how life created central nervous systems, and these finally made consciousness possible. This is not a medical consideration, but an ontological one, i.e. what philosophy should do.
And that consciousness you can look at and measure it. But what you cannot do is experience what belongs to others. Others can tell you verbally what they are experiencing, but you cannot feel it.
The idea that this experience can be described in physical terms is nonsense, because experience is neither a physical nor a biological concept. If you want to translate this experience into biological terms, it is nervous excitement. And you can only feel this yourself.

Consciousness is neither the contents we being aware of information apprehend, nor the resulting qualia, but being aware of information.

The way I put it is 'sentient consciousness is the capacity for experience. Rational sentient consciousness also includes the capacity for reason'.

one can hardly anthropomorphize humans

:clap: But today's naturalism tends on the contrary to animalise humans, to deny any essential distinction to being human (see Anything but Human.)

Many argue that intentional being is too different from physical being to be reduced to it – a position performatively affirmed by eliminative materialists

Perhaps you could comment on that a little further?

Thus, natural science begins with a Fundamental Abstraction

I see the origin of the fundamental abstraction in Galileo's mathematization of nature, combined with the separation of primary and secondary qualities. This is the point where the objects of physics proper came to be conceived solely in terms of attributes which could be successfully quantized - mass, velocity, force, and so on - whilst appearance and many other attributes were assigned to the observer, and thus relegated, in effect, to the subjective domain, with what is physically measurable being declared what is actually real - hence, modern physicalism, the veritable origin of what you're calling 'the standard model'.

It is as absurd to reject replicable introspection because its token is private, as to reject Galileo’s observations because he made them in solitude.

Here I differ. The point about Galileo's observations, and Newton's laws, is that they can be validated in the third person. In that vital sense, they're objective - the same for all who can observe them. Introspection, per se, has no such method of validation - this was the cause of the failure of the early psychological methods of Willhelm Wundt.

Phenomenology introduces a disciplined method of the examination of the nature of experience, although I don't know whether it could be called 'introspective'.

Self-knowledge - insight into the nature of one's mind - often comes, not through introspection, but through life events. Thinking about the nature of experience in the naive sense of awareness of one's own stream of thinking rarely gets you any further than self-absorption, while true self-awareness often requires something more than that, often appearing in the form of shock, loss, or dissappointment. Perhaps the term is 'soul-searching'. But I don't know if the anodyne term of 'introspection' really conveys that.

For [Aristotle], form and ‘matter’ (ὕλη) are not things, but the foundations for two modes of conceptualization.

Excellent - sums up an idea that has been in the back of my mind reading Aristotelian-Thomistic dualism for a long while. I've never studied either Aristotle or Aquinas in depth and at my stage in life, I'm not likely to, but I've come to see the 'A-T' school as representative of the 'perennial philosophy' in Western culture.

Well, that is one opinion. Law of nature are not some outside force that acts on nature. Surely you are aware that not all physicists hold to your concept of laws. It is because things behave in an orderly way that formulating laws is possible. — Fooloso4

First, the laws of nature are not "outside." They are intrinsic -- coextensive with what they control. Second, the existence of alternate opinions is not an argument against a view. The question is what is required to explain the facts of experience. Third, the question is: why do "things behave in an orderly way"? Surely, it is neither a coincidence nor because we describe them as doing so. Rather, it is because something makes them do so. The name given to that something is "the laws of nature."

Why do you think it is? — Fooloso4

Because nature has an intentional, law-like aspect.

Perhaps consciousness does not transcend the bounds of physics either, only our current understanding of physics. — Fooloso4

It depends on how you define physics. That is the point of the article. As long as you limit physics by the fundamental abstraction, it cannot explain the facts that abstraction prescinds from.

First, this paper needs more focus. About half way through I forgot what you were even trying to show. You jump from this idea, to that idea from this philosopher, to over here, and I don't see a lot of commonality between them. You could probably cut your paper by quite a bit and still get to the point that you want. — Philosophim

Thank you. I wanted to connect all the points I made because they build one upon another. The reviewers had no problem with that, accepting the paper in 12 days.

First, are you a neuroscientist? This is an incredibly bold claim — Philosophim

No, I am a theoretical physicist by training, a generalist by work experience, and a philosopher by inclination. I am aware of the boldness of my claim. For that reason I needed to I needed to start from the ground and build up, dealing with logically successive topics.

A neuroscientist will tell you, "We don't yet understand everything about the brain yet." — Philosophim

I neither expect nor assume that they do. I do assume that they will not abandon the view that the brain represents and processes data. The need for representation and processing was seen by Aristotle, and the fact that the brain is the data processing organ was established by Galen. So, it is unlikely that further discoveries will change this fundamental fact after all this time.

There is more than enough evidence that consciousness results from a physical basis. — Philosophim

There is no such evidence. There is lots of evidence that the contents of awareness depend on physical processing, but contents are not our awareness of contents (which is what subjective, not medical, consciousness is).

The hard problem really boils down to "What is it like to be another conscious being?" — Philosophim

I suggest you re-read the section of the paper in which I quote Chalmers on the Hard Problem. There is no problem of what it is like to be a bat, because problems are about understanding experience, not about having experiences we cannot have.

Does that mean that we don't need physical medium for consciousness to exist? No, we do. — Philosophim

This is a different problem -- that of "immortality of the soul." It is one that natural science does not have the means to resolve. I do agree, however, that rational thought requires the physical representation of data.

The hard problem reflects the failure in our ability to experience what it is like to be another conscious being. — Philosophim

You do not understand what the Hard Problem is. Chalmers said, "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect." This is not a problem about the experience of others, but of subjectivity per se. To be a subject is to be one pole in the subject-object relation we call "knowing" -- the pole that is aware of the object's intelligibility.

This is not what emergence means. — Philosophim

The point that contextualizes my definition is that "emergence" is ill-defined. You quote one definition, but there are others. I say what I mean by "emergence" to avoid confusion in what follows. We are all allowed to define our technical terms as we wish.

And yet we find plants react to the world in a way that we consider to be conscious. — Philosophim

This is equivocating on "consciousness". There is medical consciousness, which is a state of responsiveness, and this is seen, in an analogous way, in plants. That kind of consciousness need not entail subjectivity -- the awareness of the stimuli to which we are responding. You made the point earlier. We cannot know what it is like to be a bat or a plant, or even if it s "like" anything, instead of something purely mechanical -- devoid of an experiential aspect.

Almost certainly AI will inevitably, if not somewhere already, be labeled as conscious. — Philosophim

This non-fact is non-evidence.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading and responding to my work.

To start, it's very well written. Clear and thorough. I don't think I've read a better one here on the forum. — T Clark

Thank you.

This indicates the problems with the scientific study of consciousness are philosophical, logical, not scientific. — T Clark

Exactly. Nothing in the proposed paradigm places any restriction on scientific work. I only seek to re-contextualize it.

You make a quick arm-wave to current cognitive scientific study of consciousness without showing you have given them a fair hearing. — T Clark

As you pointed out, I am not disputing any science. So, I saw no need to say more than what the studies conclude.

You talk about a Standard Model of neurophysiology which, as far as I can tell, is a concept you came up with yourself. — T Clark

It is my term. I define it. I think it is a fair description of a general, but not universal, view. If you think it is not, please say why.

Thank you for the reference to Merleau-Ponty. While I do not agree with all of what he says, I agree with much of it. Our knowledge is not "objective." It is human knowledge -- a knowledge of how reality relates to us as humans, and not a divine knowledge -- not one of nature simply as it is.

I've read most of the article. As I too am generally critical of physicalism and reductionism, then I'm onside with your general approach ('the enemy of the enemy is my friend ;-) ) - although there are a few specific points with which I will take issue, when I've spent a bit more time digesting it. — Wayfarer

I look forward to your comments.